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The misery is considered as a wide spectrum which contains many kinds like physical, emotional and mental and some add spiritual too. You come to consciousness one day and you realize that you are, and you are here with many others, so many others. At first you meet an illusion, an illusion that everything is good, beautiful and wonderful. At first you feel the warmth, the soft touch of existence but it fades away, it fades away sooner than one would like. It slips away like sand slips from hand, more you try to hold it tightly more it slips away, and then comes realization of hardships, struggle and …. misery.
If our childhood wasn’t obviously bad then after we grow up, we look at our childhood and tell ourselves an ideal lie” oh the days of being a kid, a little child, they were so magical, so full of life and joy, now if only I can have something like that back in my life”, but is it the case? Are we miserable because we lost the wonder of a child?
A child is a miserable thing even more than an adult is. A child mostly hates his or her condition, lack of freedom and power bothers them to no end, small things may lighten a child up but small things hurts them too. Children’s happiness may come cheap but so does their suffering and pain. We find happiness and joy in childhood in the same way as we find pleasure and enthusiasm in being young when we get old. Though, being young is not just pleasure and fun, actually that’s just a facade that hides lots of pressure, insecurities and pain behind it.
Heaven, we lost in the past.
The thing is, we usually have this tendency to find past better because we actually don’t live in that past, we live in present and present is always miserable, sometimes more, sometimes less but miserable none the less. Whatever is your present, misery is the most flexible bitch there is, it creeps in even when there are no cracks.
If you can look closer you will find that most if not all of life is nothing but a longing, like a slow burn. Each and every feeling of happiness, of joy, of pleasure is notoriously short- lived. It’s funny that the moment you realize you are happy, it starts fading. Every accomplishment, every sense of achievement diminishes and finally concludes into oblivion. Good in this world is a feeble instance.
The Delima of having what you want.
A friend of mine once bought a phone which he wanted to buy from a long time. He was saving money by cutting expenses in almost everything from months and finally he bought it. After few days of him using it, I asked him how he is felling about the phone. He said its good and all; he said he is really happy now that he is finally using it. I found it really amusing that more than me he was convincing himself that he is happy, he should be happy, that it was worth it, because if not then what was the point to begin with. In reality the phone became mundane for him from the second day of purchase, after few more days he even starts forgetting where he kept it.
It’s not his fault though, this is a small example, but this is the fate of every happiness, joy, achievement and desire. Like when you were really sick, all you wanted was to get healthy, like health is the only happiness, only joy there is, and after you got healthy soon you realize again…. that being healthy is MUNDANE.
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Having a close look upon pleasures and excitement, you will find it’s actually pain, sweet and intriguing pain but pain none the less. Pleasure is an intense hope of getting completeness, of fulfilling yourself once and for all and yet by design pleasure can only be in being incomplete. It’s the rush of being just an inch away from the absolute and never actually reaching it just to repeat the process again and again and again, what we call pleasure. But pleasure can also be a different kind of suffering when you want it but can’t have it. It seems to me that life can’t give you much but can take a lot from you.
A place of absurdity begs to search for the meaning, if not the intrinsic then the temporary one. So, people gave their own meaning in the face of evident and prominent nihilism.
A frog in the bowl of water.
Humans have this habit to mold their reality according to their desire and preference. We have done it since we started to exist as an intelligent species. At first it was little easy to fool ourselves that we are really important, but as we grew as an intelligent species and began to realize that we are nothing more than a random speck in the unimaginable vastness of universe, it became harder and harder to keep our dear illusions.
We live our lives bounded by the subjectivity of our little circle. It’s here that we give meaning to our lives and it’s in this subjectivity that our word is, therefore, it doesn’t matter how big the universe is or how miniscule we are. Your universe will always be your little circle and the thing is, it won’t be little for you.
Our life is definitely meaningless and insignificant but not because of the vastness or eternity of universe and triviality or ephemerality of our lives, but because all this seriousness, hardship, struggle, efforts and our misery amounts to nothing at all.
So, it’s here your world is and it’s here your hell is. The life is not absurd because the nearest star after sun is 4.25 light years away, but because we exist just to suffer and then to stop existing again.
They say life also have good things, but what is the purpose or need of good things? You need them so you can somehow pass by through the misery. If there was no misery, why would you need the opposite? You feel hunger so you eat to vanquish that, but then you feel hungry again and then again. You get bored so you go for entertainment. You feel sorrow so you need joy. You feel incomplete so you search for completeness. You feel less so you want more.
What good is in the good?
Good things are not intrinsically good. We call them good because these things manage our misery, but if there was no misery in the first place, there wouldn’t be any need of GOOD. All good things seem to be there just for the realization of bad. One can say that this is also true the other way around as you need all the bad things to realize good ones too, but when one will put both scenarios to balance you will find that the scales are always in Favour of bad. Most of the moments of life are miserable not joyful, most of the life is struggle not fun and games.
So if we are miserable since our birth, where does this misery arises from? Where are its roots? Why is it that the first glimpse of consciousness comes with the cry? Well it’s actually simple and straight, you are not miserable you are the misery itself. Your existence is the sole reason of your suffering everything else is just a consequence. You see the thing is, only incomplete, only instability can exist. You can’t be complete and still be existing. When something is absolute it stops existing. Even if something that exists seems to be absolute, it will surely be lacking in some way, you just can’t spot the deficiencies right away, and a deeper look may reveal the truth.
Journey of existence
Everything that exists is in constant process of trying to reach the absolute state. The process is going to be infinite because its very own existence is the error. All of your misery emotional, mental or physical has its roots in the incompleteness of your existence in one way or another, and because you do exist you will always be going to want to be free of misery because as I mentioned earlier existence in any form is a constant longing for the absolute, for completeness, for being fulfilled.
It is the irony that the very thing that makes one to crave for completeness is the sole reason one can’t have it. Until something exists, it can’t be absolute. In a weird way only, absence can be absolute. Absence doesn’t mean “nothing”, even nothing or empty have such crude meaning in our lives that they almost have the presence of their own. Absence as a word to me doesn’t mean anything in itself; it only indicates that existence has ceased.
So, if you can’t be free of misery until you stop existing should you commit suicide or something? Well, are you going to? The question is not should you; the real question is can you? The thing is, not existing is not an issue when you do not exist but once you do, well it’s just another suffering in line. It cracks me up, that after you start to exist; not existing again is such a hassle and a big deal. Most people are not afraid of death itself; most people are afraid of the process of it. People are not afraid of death but dying. If you can give a switch to everyone which will kill them with a flick without any kind of pain, like they are going in a deep peaceful sleep, thousands of people if not more will choose to die right away and millions more will follow in the coming days and months.
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